


No Sleep For the Living

by potterslittledragon



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Basically it's all sad with brief reprives of cuteness, Draco is Sad, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Harry has PTSD, Hogwarts, Hogwarts Eighth Year, Insomnia, M/M, Nightmares, Room of Requirement
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-21
Updated: 2017-03-09
Packaged: 2018-09-18 21:43:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9404345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/potterslittledragon/pseuds/potterslittledragon
Summary: Things have changed since the Battle of Hogwarts; Harry Potter is haunted in his dreams with the faces of the people who died and can hardly look at himself in the mirror.Ron and Hermione have become the poster couple for a book called "How to Discreetly Stage an Intervention for Your Ex-Chosen-One Best Friend" that Harry is certain they are writing.Draco Malfoy spends his nights restless and semi-awake and his days the same way.All was NOT well. Or not yet, at least.Alternatively: Four Nightmares Harry Potter Had, and One He Didn't Have To.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [indigoprinceofslytherin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/indigoprinceofslytherin/gifts).



> This work is part of the 15k fic collection and is dedicated to Indigo, who, well, asked for it!

All Was Not Well. It’s dark in the room, but Harry Potter can still just make out the figure of George Weasley standing in front of him. A shock of red hair and the signature look of someone who is going to cause trouble. But at second glance, Harry can see that this person has two ears, where George should only have one, and that George’s eyes don’t twinkle like that anymore and his mouth no longer quirks up the way it used to and the realisation hits him like a tonne of cinderblocks that this isn’t George Weasley, It’s Fred. The scene dissolves and rematerializes around him but now he isn’t standing in a dark room, he’s outside the Room of Requirement and he’s standing with Hermione and Ron and Fred, George and Percy. Percy had just jinxed Thicknesse who was on the ground looking rather similar to a sea urchin.   
Fred is laughing, ‘you actually are joking, Perce… I don’t think I’ve heard you joke since we were-‘  
But then the air around them erupts and they are all thrown away, and when it seemed only a split second beforehand they were all in relative safety, the universe is ripped apart. Harry is flying through the air, nearly dropping his wand and landing with a thud on the stone floor, hearing the shrieks and yells of his companions without knowing what has happened to them. And then the world somehow resolves itself- snaps back into reality like a rubber band pulled too tightly- into pain and semi-darkness: he is half buried under a pile of stones and the warm stickiness on his cheek tells him that he is bleeding rather heavily. Then he hears a terrible cry, one which pulls at his insides and expresses a sort of agony that cannot be caused by flames or curses, and he stands up, more frightened then he might ever have been in his life.   
‘No – no – no – no!’ somebody is shouting. ‘No! Please no! Fred! No!’  
And Percy is shaking his little brother and Ron is kneeling beside them and George looks almost as dead as his twin and Fred stares, ever unseeing, at the roof, and the look of entertainment makes a permanent home on his face. And hopeless sorrow pours into Harry like an ocean and the halls of Hogwarts are gone again and he is back in the dark room with Fred.   
‘You did this to me! It’s your fault that I’m dead! Can’t you see that if you weren’t here, if Voldemort had killed you as a baby like he was meant to, none of this would have happened! I would still be here! Running the store with George! Messing with my brothers! Giving Ginny’s dates a rough time! I would have still been alive! ALIVE! BUT NO YOU HAD TO SURVIVE AND WE ALL FOUGHT FOR YOU HARRY! LOOK WHERE THAT GOT US!? I’M DEAD! DEAD BECAUSE OF YOU!’ Fred is screaming, and Harry knows that every word he utters is the truth, because he wouldn’t’ve been dead if Harry was first.   
‘I’m sorry’ He whispers ‘I am so sorry. I can’t even at look myself in the mirror. I am sorry Fred. I’m so-‘  
‘Harry, Harry mate, wake up. You’re having another dream. Harry!’ harry could hear Ron faintly beneath Fred’s screaming and he felt himself being shaken but the dream had got him trapped. ‘Hermione, he’s not waking up!’  
‘Sonorous’ he heard over Fred shouting, and the word sounds familiar, though he can’t remember from where, ‘Harry!’  
Hermione’s voice is so loud that it wakes Harry. And if not for the silencing charms cast on the room would have woken half of the entire school. However all through the Gryffindor dorms, people are stirring, some shoot bolt upright in bed, others merely cracking an eyelid and rolling over to go back to sleep. Because this was now quite a common occurrence at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, every few nights, a selection of students and teachers alike would be awoken by a sonorous-ed wake up call for Harry Potter.   
In the Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw rooms the cries could very occasionally be heard, only when the silencing charms broke, and whether or not the students woke up on these nights was closely correlated to whether or not they could sleep through a clap of thunder at night. From the Slytherin dungeons, almost nobody woke, even the, save for a few exceptionally jumpy other eighth years and the very occasional younger light sleeper. No one had worked out why the sound travelled that far in the first place (Seamus had laughed and said “magic”). But if you were never sleeping in the first place, you can’t be woken, which is why Draco Malfoy heard Hermione’s shouting more often than most.


	2. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know the last chapter was short and teaser-ish so apologies, but here is the next bit. So enjoy!

Harry wakes with tears in his eyes, to be met with Ron and Hermione, both with tears streaming down their faces. Hermione wraps her arms around the two boys and the three of them cling to each other, almost as if they will drift away in the ocean of sadness if they let go of each other. They stay like this for almost ten minutes; Ron crying over the death of his brother, Harry crying because it’s his fault and Hermione because, well, since the war she’s always crying. Until Harry apologises and stands, walking out of the room and leaving Ron and Hermione sitting of his bed, crying and hugging. But due to Harrys low tolerance to hugging and crying when he knows that it is his fault that said hugging and crying is happening, he can’t stand to be in the room with Hermione and Ron for too long at this time of night.   
It’s become almost a routine for him; nightmare, waking up, crying, walking around the castle for hours until the sun comes up. Or more recently; walking around the castle all night while trying to put off sleep for days at a time, only giving in when he is literally too tired to even think about keeping himself awake. When he’s so tired that even his nightmares can’t penetrate the depth of his exhaustion, that’s the only time that Harry can really relax. And it can’t really pass off as relaxation either. Hermione suggests often that he should go and visit Madame Pomfrey, either to talk about what’s troubling him to hopefully get it off his conscience, or otherwise to ask to get a dreamless sleep potion. But he will not. He deserves to be kept up at night by the dreams, by the innocent people that died for him. That he killed.   
The thing about walking, Harry thought to himself, is that it’s almost as if, if I walk far enough and fast enough, my nightmares can’t catch up.  
Spoke too soon, thought Harry as a flash of pale skin, white-blonde hair and icy grey eyes rounded the corner and the two boys almost crashed into each other. And the demons that he had been trying so hard to outrun, suddenly slammed back into him with the force of a small dragon at the sight of none other than Draco Malfoy.  
“What are you doing out of bed, Potter?” Draco sneered, his mouth twisted into his ever-present smirk, although it had been kind of subdued lately.   
“Like it’s any of your business, Malfoy. Besides, I could ask you the same question” Harry bit back.   
“Have you been...” Malfoy paused for a second, his head cocked to one side, looking, studying, evaluating, “… crying?” and for a moment the regular look of arrogant indifference and cruelty that Harry had found himself on the receiving end of for almost eight years seemed to dissolve and in its place was a look that he found unfamiliar and hard to decipher on this pinched, pale face. Was it concern? Worry? Sadness? Empathy? He looked almost as if he wanted to hug Harry or place a hand on his shoulder, something comforting. But within seconds that look in turn shifted back to his normal mask.   
“Poor Potter, can’t even sleep at night without bursting into tears” he barked.   
“Damnit, Malfoy!” Harry closed his eyes to steady himself “Just leave me alone, I can’t deal with your shit tonight!”  
“Fine” the other boy bit out before spinning on his heel and stalking off to wherever he came from, most likely the Slytherin common rooms. Harry walking in the opposite direction moments after.

Harry had been walking for hours, he sunk to his knees outside the entrance to the Room of Requirement, and however he found it strange that he could see a door, when he hadn’t asked for anything. I don’t know what I want he thought. The door was still there, and curious as to what would lie behind it, he rose up and pushed the heavy oak thing in as quietly as he could manage. A room of which the likes of Harry had never seen before greeted him, it reminded him of something that had once been treasured but was now locked away, hidden away from prying eyes. It was hard to explain, more of a feeling than a visual appearance. A feeling of secrecy and urgency and sadness. In fact, when he ever tried to think about this room, all he could remember was the feeling, never the actual physicality. But it sounded like he wasn’t alone in the room. He could hear deep, ragged sobbing in between choking, gasping breaths, and then a pained whine that sounded so terrified, so broken that Harry was torn between wanting to help and thinking that he had fallen asleep and a new nightmare was here to greet him. His curiosity and overwhelming need to save people won out in the end, and maybe he hoped, just a little, that if he helped this person, he maybe wouldn’t be such a bad one.   
He rounded a corner and found himself, for the second time that night, in the presence of Draco Malfoy. Except this time he was sitting on the cold, grey stone floor with his back against the wall, his knees drawn up tight to his chest and his head resting on his knees. His fingers were knotted in his hair and the heels of his palms were pressed into his eye sockets, attempting to staunch the flow of tears. He was shaking with now-silent sobs that racked his entire body with the force of an earthquake, pausing only to draw breath. Harry felt like such an intruder in this moment, this was private, off-limits to him. But somehow, he felt like he understood the other boy for the first time, at least a little better than he did before.   
He finally understood that Draco Malfoy was human, a real human being that felt things and cried and laughed and made bad decisions, wrong decisions but probably also good ones too, and Harry worked out that he couldn’t say any less for himself. He wasn’t a saint, no matter how much everybody else believed he was. He wasn’t all good in the way that he now knew that Draco wasn’t all bad. And he remembered something that Sirius had told him once, something about there being not only good people and death-eaters, not only Angels and Devils. There is too much grey to divide people in that way. People do good things for bad reasons and bad things for good reasons, and somehow he remembered something an old Muggle schoolteacher had asked him when he was young, “a man robs a store, is that a good or a bad thing to do? Should he go to jail?” Of course Harry had answered that yes it was a bad thing and yes he should go to jail.   
“But what if he was stealing food to feed his sick wife and baby daughter? Should he still go to jail? Is he a bad person?” she had asked, and Harry had found himself stumped by that, no he wasn’t a bad person but should he go to jail, was it a bad thing to do? Of course he couldn’t have been any older than eight or nine at the time but it was still something that he considered often, even now.   
And somehow, it had never occurred to Harry that maybe Draco was real- that he was not just another nameless, faceless death-eater to fight, another task to accomplish, another problem to solve, that he was real and alive and, well, hurting- until now. It wasn’t until he found him, weeping and crumpled like a discarded piece of used parchment in this strange room, that he realised that he was. 

Harry still wanted to help somehow (Ron would have laughed and told him that he had a crazy saviour’s complex if he wasn’t reduced to tears every time he heard his brother’s name, if he wasn’t so shattered from the war), but thinking on the words the pair had exchanged earlier, and for almost eight years he decided that was a terrible idea. And for fear of being seen and hexed or yelled at or killed or worse, he spun silently and left the room of requirement and it’s occupant, spending the rest of the night mulling over what he saw. And thinking a lot about Draco. 

\--

The next morning from the Gryffindor table, Harry found himself staring at Draco, not that it was an oddity or anything, he just thought that he had kicked the habit after sixth year. But he couldn’t help but notice that Draco’s hair was limper than it was before and his eyes seemed less cruel and more sad and the rings under his eyes told Harry of many sleepless nights and a fair bit of crying and he found himself hopeless to help. And hopelessness was a feeling that Harry no longer wanted to associate with.


	3. Chapter 3

With almost all eighth years shattered after the war, and banned from playing quiddich for their houses (it was unfair to the younger students), there wasn’t a lot of fun to be had, however McGonagall had set up a few things to try to help them to not drive themselves completely mad. The first of these things was permission to visit Hogsmead whenever they liked, which is how Thursday found Harry, Ron, Hermione, Luna, Ginny, Dean, Neville and Seamus skipping History of Magic to visit the small town. Admittedly, Luna and Ginny shouldn’t have been allowed to leave, however the teachers had started treating them like eighth years after they got back and so rules were bent and backs were turned when they skipped out with the others. Hermione almost never joined them but somehow almost all members of their little gang had decided (separately) that it was imperative that she be there as they had something to tell everybody.   
They all settled into a rather large booth in the Hogs Head and Dean placed orders for Butterbeers,   
“It’s on the house,” Aborforth told him when he tried to pay. Harry was replaying the image of Draco crying in the strange room (Harry also decided that he needed to come up with a name for it. The room of sadness? The room of secrets?). Small talk was being made about which quiddich team would win the cup this year, Ron said the Cannons, Ginny said the Harpies but Seamus was convinced that it would be the -----. Hermione had out her History of Magic textbook and was reading through next lesson’s chapter for the eighth time, Luna looked out into the distance with a frown, actually it was more a suggestion of a frown, resting between her eyebrows, whispering very softly to herself. Neville held Ginny’s hand under the table and thought that nobody could see but when he met Harry’s eye, Harry winked at him and his ears turned pink.   
Harry and Ginny had broken up right after they returned to school, Ginny had said that it honestly wasn’t Harry’s fault, that for some reason she didn’t particularly want to snog anyone as such ever, let alone go any further and when she cast her mind down the track, she thought that Harry was a very snog-and-take-it-further kind of person (which he accepted as the truth and so wasn’t offended by in the slightest) and that she had been thinking about it for a long time and they both agreed that their romantic relationship might not be the best thing for them. Harry loved her company and loved her, and felt like they could have had a happy, comfortable life together, but it was a kind of love that felt more like the way a brother loves his sister. So when she got with Neville, of course he was as happy for them as their best friend should be. Plus they made a perfect couple and he would approve of any sister of dating him.   
When the drinks arrived at their table they all thanked Aborforth and proceeded to chug down half of their glasses happily before pausing when Ron asked them all what they had gathered to talk about.   
Ginny was the first to answer the question. “Neville and I are together” she blurted, then took a long swig of her drink to avoid answering any questions and Neville got redder, but there were no questions asked as everyone nodded in a half knowing, half accepting manner and Dean pressed a sickle into Ron’s hand, making Ginny blush as well.   
“While we are on the topic of people being together,” Seamus started, then he took Deans hand and rose it a little above the table as an explanation. The group reaction was very similar to that of the reaction to Neville and Ginny’s confession, however Ron’s eyebrows arched slightly as he looked between them and Hermione extracted herself from her textbook and looked pointedly at him and he gave Dean’s sickle to her as he said,   
“Well alright guys, good for you.” And Seamus smiled at Luna who beamed back at them. I’m glad that went well and thank you, his face said and hers was saying back, see I told you that everything would be OK.   
“What’s your news Luna?” Hermione asked softly.   
Luna closed her eyes and shook her head, her ghost-frown returning, “maybe I’ll tell you a bit later, I don’t think I’m sure how to word it” she said in her lilting voice. The people at the table OK-ed and nodded and shrugged. And Harry felt quite detached, like he was there the whole time but at the same time he wasn’t. He witnessed it and took it in and felt happy but his mind was too busy thinking about how he could help Draco to really participate much outside of nodding and making encouraging comments when they were called for. 

After the rest of a slow-moving day, Harry returned to the Gryffindor common room with a foot of parchment to write for Defence homework PLUS he had to work on his charms project, not to mention catching up on what he had missed in Binn’s class. While he was distinctly not looking forward to writing his essay on the pros and cons of a disarming spell versus those of a stunning spell, and certainly not to copying Hermione’s notes on the mass unicorn slaughter of the late 1830’s in Eastern Europe, he found himself quite exited for his charms assignment. The task was to turn a regular item into something of magical use, to be utilised to make life easier at St. Mungo’s, the wizarding hospital or outside in the general wizarding community. Flitwick had said to his class that the best results would be sent there after he deemed them both useful and safe so Harry had spent ages on attempting to come up with an idea that was worth using. He had purchased a small stuffed bear while in Hogsmead a few days beforehand and had spent the time since trying to work out how to do what he wanted to do.   
Four hours, a foot of parchment, half a pot of ink and two games of exploding snap later, Ron and Hermione both said their goodnights to Harry and trudged sleepily up to their respective rooms. Harry was still tinkering with his teddy when they left but soon he too would have to either head off to bed or leave the dorms and start wandering around and tonight the latter sounded more appealing. He had a sufficient supply of Pepper-Up potion that he could use in the morning if need be, even if Hermione and Ginny spent all day telling him that he shouldn’t be reliant on it and that he should try to sleep properly.   
After he finally made up his mind at around midnight to go for a walk, he bid goodbye to the portrait of the Fat Lady and, ignoring her protests, began his walk. At least I don’t actually need to stay under my cloak all the time now, he thought, although sometimes on particularly terrible nights he would take it with him anyway.   
He marched down a flight of seemingly unfamiliar stairs and found himself somehow outside the entrance to the Slytherin rooms and then quickly turned and scurried away, of course he still wanted to confront Malfoy and ask about what he was doing in the Room of Requirement but not like this. He didn’t want the other boy to think that he was actually looking for him and turning up outside of the Slytherin common would definitely give out those vibes. So he ran back up the stairs, taking them two at a time for good measure and when he spun around the second corner on the way to get out of the castle, he slammed into another person, knocking them backwards so that they both fell, Harry on top. Harry started to panic, what if this was a death eater who wants revenge for him killing Voldemort? What if it’s a ministry official that he just bowled over? What if it’s somebody who wants to tear the castle apart looking for him and he has just walked directly into their waiting arms? Thoughts, and likely irrational ones at that, were racing through his mind at a mile a minute as he rushed to regain his footing to face his attacker.   
“Who’s there?” He asked, panic evident in his voice, “Oh, it’s just you, Malfoy,” he breathed after the other person cast a weak Lumos that gently illuminated their face.   
“Why are you out again? Did you have another bad dream?” Malfoy asked cruelly, “Poor widdle potty” he sneered.  
Harry almost yelled, “Piss off, Malfoy”  
“Gladly” he returned, face twisted into a show of just how much he didn’t want to be in ‘Potter’s’ presence.   
Yet again Draco strutted towards the direction of the Room of Requirement and Harry actually wondered whether he actually wanted to help Malfoy anymore, now that he was being such an arsehole.   
“Wait!” he called after the retreating figure, “I saw you in the Room last night you know.” Harry saw him visibly stiffen. Draco spun around so violently that Harry was surprised that the paintings didn’t all fall off the walls from the shock of it.   
“What did you see exactly?” he snarled back, already stalking forward dangerously.   
“You.” He went for the shortest, safest answer, the one where he saw himself keeping all of his extremities still attached to the rest of his body in future.   
Draco was livid now, he latched a hand into the collar of Harry’s night robes and pulled him forward so that they were standing face to face, almost nose to nose, “I’ll ask you one more time. What. Did. You. See?”  
“You were on the floor and you were crying.” Yet again Harry took the concise option, honestly beginning to fear for his balls.   
Draco let go of his shirt almost immediately and sunk to the floor and Harry followed suit, sitting next to him with his back pressed into the hard, stone wall behind him.   
“It’s alright, you know” Harry whispered into the darkness, Draco must have casted his Nox while Harry wasn’t paying attention.   
“Oh yeah, coming from you,” Draco whispered back, and Harry felt the sting of his comment burrow its way down, but he could deal with that later.   
“Hey, you can cry if you want to, and I mean this in the nicest possible way- but no one cares. You can cry, you can scream, you can send a letter of absolute hatred to someone, you can murder twelve people and string them out on your washing line if you want. Nobody cares.” Harry stopped, “wait, maybe not the last one, I think the Ministry might care about that,” he corrected, which earned him a short bark of laughter which in turn made him feel quite accomplished.   
“But I’ll tarnish the family name, and Merlin knows I’ve already done enough of that. Plus, Slytherins don’t cry. Well more like they don’t show weakness because that weakness can be exploited, why else do you think that I hide in that miserable room?” Malfoy asked.  
“Fair call, but that is honestly ridiculous. I know, I know, it’s none of my business and I will leave now if you want as long as you aren’t planning on committing any mass-murders before sunrise because there is only so much I can deal with in one night. You aren’t even allowed to kill one person either, for that matter.”  
“You know for ‘The Hero of the Wizarding World’ you really are quite humorous.”  
“Thanks,” Harry breathed, standing from his place next to Malfoy, “I think.”  
“You’re welcome.” He half smiled, “I think.”  
Harry left slowly, he was curious as to what Draco would do after he did leave, and his answer was nothing. He crept up the endless flights of stairs and whispered staccato at the Fat Lady and she welcomed him in, saying how she was glad that he decided to finally get some rest. Sleep that night was blissfully dreamless.

Harry didn’t see Draco the next day before dinner, although not for lack of trying. He hadn’t turned up for either breakfast or lunch and they shared no classes. Even when Harry went out of his way to bypass Draco’s Muggle Studies class (it was a condition of his release that he would take the subject and so he did, albeit begrudgingly) on his way to Defence in the afternoon he was not to be found. He wanted to ask him if he felt any better or if he needed someone to talk to. He couldn’t understand what it was that stirred deep in the pit of his stomach when he thought of Draco but he didn’t think that it was nice. The feeling was almost that of his tiny model Horntail flying around inside his abdomen, hot and flying and more than a little dangerous. And even a little afraid. The dragon was beating incessantly at the thought of the two of them talking to each other in the darkness last night and while it scared Harry, he had to admit that there was something a little thrilling and a lot nice about having a proper, civil conversation with the boy who he had spent seven years throwing curses and hexes and jinxes and threats and sly remarks at.   
He skipped history of magic again to continue working on his charms project and to (definitely not) copy Hermione’s potions homework. The small bear sat on his desk as he wrote, watching Harry with its beady plastic eyes until he found his mind wandering so far that he abandoned all efforts to complete the homework- the method for brewing a successful pepper-up potion and started doodling mindlessly on a new sheet of parchment. It was not as if the new potions teacher, Professor Skrewt (all of the eighth years agreed that he had quite an unfortunate name), would care. As much as Harry had hated Professor Snape he almost missed his potions classes and Slughorn had run away soon after the battle, telling Headmistress McGonagall that it was for his health and safety. Hogwarts is the safest place you can be right now Horace, and now that Voldemort is dead there is no need for you to be on the run anyway, she had told him to which he had smiled weakly and said it is more for my health than my safety Headmistress, I intend to stay in retirement this time.   
The bear was still looking at Harry as if asking what he was going to do with it. It had to be for children, he had decided that much already hence the teddy, something for children in a position similar to his preferably. Possibly young muggle-born children. An idea washed over him and he pulled out a new sheet of parchment, ignoring what was drawn on the last one, and started writing at a speed comparable to his first Nimbus, this is going to do wonders for somebody, he thought.


	4. Chapter 4

At dinner, Harry made polite conversation with Ron and Seamus, looking up to catch Malfoy’s eyes often, before they flitted away to look down at his plate or at Zabini. When he finally gave up on looking away as if he wasn’t watching Harry as much as Harry was watching him, Harry gave him a smile that said a combination of well hello there and are you feeling OK? to which Draco let the corner of his lip quirk up in a response to both and Harry felt his cheeks flush at it, to the surprise of them both and the blond boy quirked a pale eyebrow at him in a silent, long distance conversation. Harry’s attention was jerked away from their friendly interaction by Seamus choking on his drink, however. Ron was thumping his back in an effort to be helpful and Hermione was glaring at Ron.  
“That’s not something that you just ask people, Ronald,” she snapped.  
“I’m sorry, I was just curious, that’s all,” he replied meekly.   
“It’s fine guys, honestly, just a wee bit of a surprise that’s all.” Seamus had recovered and was now laughing. Harry was in a state of utmost befuddlement. “I didn’t wake up one day and think to myself, you know what, Seamus, you are a flaming queer, if that’s what you are wondering.” Ron and Harry laughed, Hermione glared some more, “no it was more like one day I just looked at my best friend and thought, merlins fucking pants I love you and then when he was dating Ginny I just kind of wanted to hit her. Or hit him. Or pin him against the wall and kiss him, you know?” Seamus finished. Hermione was nodding gently, Ron was flushing so hard that not only were his cheeks red but also so was his ears, his neck and the rest of his entire face and Harry was watching Pansy bat her eyelashes at Draco and feeling like he just wanted to hit her with a stinging hex so violent that she refused to get out of bed for a week.   
Sleep that night was painful, he had the worst dream in the cycle and while he didn’t wake up screaming, he was sobbing so hard that it was difficult to breath and couldn’t get the images out of his head. It was the one where he followed the ghost of Pavarti Patil (she had hung herself from the highest curtain rod in the Gryffindor common room two months after school commenced and was found with a note by a second year Hufflepuff student who still hadn’t been dismissed by Madam Pomfrey. The note was charmed to show different messages to whoever read it but also explained for everybody to see, that she could not live without Lavender and had gone to seek her on the other side) to a room filled with everybody that had been a casualty to the war they fought for Harry. And they never say anything, they just look at him with their dead eyes, everyone that he loved, dead. Sirius and Remus and Tonks sat with Hedwig and Harry’s parents, Lavender, Pavarti, Fred and Colin sat on the other side with Cedric. Dumbledore and Moody and even Snape sat amongst them as well. All of them dead and looking as if all that they wanted was a tiny bit of his alive. When he went out walking, he didn’t run into anyone, not even the person he both least and most wanted to see.

 

The next day went by in a blur of boring classes (potions, astronomy, and history of magic where the look on the professor’s face told them that he highly disapproved of their privilege to skip classes) and by the time everybody was ready to turn in that night, Harry was exhausted but unwilling to sleep. His good luck with uninterrupted sleep would not likely last this night as well, unless someone had been slipping potions into his evening cup of tea. As everyone mumbled their tired goodnights, he yawned and muttered his own, but didn’t head out of the common room to his dorms like everybody else. Instead he crept out the door and ignored the fat lady telling him that he should try to sleep, walking down the familiar corridors to the Room of Requirement. He started pacing along the length of the wall, thinking to himself as he walked, I need to get into the sad room, I need to ge- Malfoy. He was standing in the shadowy hall behind Harry and watching him trying to get in. Harry had only walked by twice so he still had to go one more time but he stopped to watch Draco watching him.   
“What room do you need, Potter?” he drawled.  
Harry shrugged, “I don’t know,” he said.  
“Liar,” Malfoy spat, “you know exactly what you want and so do I”  
“Why do you even care so much, Malfoy?”  
“Draco,” he whispered his own name under his breath and under Harry’s confused gaze, looked down at his feet and started shuffling dust on the floor into tiny pyramids with the toe of his shoe, “just call me Draco. Not because we are really friends. Just because I don’t want to be a Malfoy anymore.” Harry, though hurt at not being considered at all a friend yet stunned by this confession of sorts, just nodded. He understood where Malf- Draco- was coming from, he was sick of what his own surname meant, and he was fighting for the right team. But there was really no way to tell him that without offending him or seeming too sympathetic. Wait, since when have I cared about offending him? Harry wondered.   
“Anyway, I don’t care. I am just curious, maybe I need to be in that room as well”  
“And what room would that be?” Harry threw back at him.   
“I don’t know. You tell me,” said Draco.  
Harry noticed that there was no longer any anger in his words, that they were now almost playful. And he found this easy, familiar banter both quite nice and quite strange. Strange as it was with Draco Malfoy of all people, and nice because everyone had started being varying degrees of awkward around him since the war, especially since they worked out that he was not exactly ‘Okay’ after it.   
“Why don’t you tell me what to ask it for and I’ll open it for us?”   
“Fine, but then you have to show me where you were trying to go”  
“Fine”  
“You have to think, I need to get into Draco’s room,” he said with a smirk  
“Why? What’s in there?” Harry was suspicious, what if Malfoy was being friendly to try to lure him into a trap?  
“Oh calm down Potter, I’m not drawing you in to kill you,” he said with a bite of snark and a huff of a laugh out at the absurdity but when he turned his head and looked Harry in the eye, he saw the legitimate terror there.   
“I’m sorry, I honestly didn’t mean to scare you, I thought, I thought that you knew that I changed.” Harry saw the mingled sincerity, disappointment, empathy and sadness written in the lines of the blond boy’s face. And as scared as he was, he knew that this time at least, Draco meant him no harm.   
Paranoia was another side-effect of the war, constantly being on edge and waiting for an attack left him constantly tired, and his jumpiness meant that even a first year walking down a corridor alone made him nervous. So it really wasn’t any surprise that Draco Malfoy inviting him into his strange room in the castle set off alarm bells. That might have been an actual dangerous situation. But it wasn’t.   
“Here. I’ll open it and then you can see it before you go in, just to check”  
Draco started walking along the edge of the wall and Harry watched, almost mesmerised, until a door appeared and swung open.   
The room had a bed and a fireplace and a few comfortable looking chairs and it reminded Harry of the Gryffindor common room in miniature. Just with more green. As he followed Draco inside he spotted another couple of doors, one was open and led into a bathroom and the other was closed although Harry suspected that it might have had beds in it.  
“What is this place?” Harry frowned.  
“It’s the Room of Requirement” Draco snarked back.   
“Well thanks for that. I figured that one out on my own, thanks. I meant what is it?”   
“It’s my room. And Blaise’s”   
“But why don’t you sleep in the Slytherin dorms?”  
“Hmm, I wonder, Potter, let me think about it” Draco said, his voice dripping in liquid sarcasm as he held up a hand with one finger, “all of the younger students are either afraid of me, hate me or worship me and honestly, the latter is the scariest.” He added another finger, “two, there is a muggle born first year who thinks that I am going to murder him in his sleep. And three,” Another finger, “I barely sleep anyways. Blaise sleeps here some nights when I do but otherwise he’s out banging Parkinson. And I have no idea why I’m telling you this, other than I want you to at least trust that I won’t create my own Death Eater army or slaughter all the muggle-borns in the school or massacre fourteen people and string them out on my washing line or kill you and throw your body off the astronomy tower.”  
Harry couldn’t understand why but he found it quite funny that Draco thought that being revered was the worst, “Oh I wouldn’t know what it feels like to be worshipped. Nope. Not at all.”  
“Ahh, but you, Potter, were fighting for the right team. It’s not particularly lovely to be thrown up on a pedestal for trying to fight FOR vol-” Malfoy seemed to stop mid-word and change the course of his sentence, “the Dark Lord,” he finished.  
“That is correct” Harry said with a frown, “But I do NOT want to hear about Zabini and Parkinson getting a good shagging together. Otherwise, I am glad that you aren’t planning to go all murderer and try to top me. That’s always a plus side for me, considering the number of people who would like nothing better than to see my body mangled beneath that godforsaken tower”  
“Trust me, I don’t either. I haven’t the foggiest idea of what Blaise thinks that I’m going to get from that knowledge but he insists on telling me anyways”  
“Ughh, I know. I love Hermione and Ron but there are some things that just shouldn’t be shared”  
“Potter, that’s foul, I didn’t want to know!”  
“And I didn’t want to know about Pansy and Blaise!”  
“Alright, alright, I suppose that makes us even”  
“Not even close Mal-” Harry paused at the blonde’s frown, “Draco,” he corrected.   
Draco began stalking towards him, one long graceful step after another, like a panther going in for the kill, until Harry too backed up until the his thighs pressed against a chair, trapped inches away from his ex-nemesis, “and what does that mean exactly?”   
“I think that means that you owe me”  
“Owe you what?”  
“I’ll think of something”  
“I’m sure that you will, Potter,” Draco said with a sneer.   
Not that Harry noticed, but Draco’s ears were tipped red.  
And not that Harry noticed, but Draco’s forty-galleon, tailored white shirt had untucked from his undershorts and his robes had bunched up a bit, revealing a swathe of pale skin pulled tight over lean, quiddich-toned muscle.   
And not that Harry noticed, but the two of them were standing very, very close. Close enough to kiss. Or hit each other. Or kiss.  
Harry noticed all of these things very suddenly.  
He also noticed the stifling amount of tension was now simmering between him. Harry felt like he had just sold his soul to the devil. If the devil was blonde and snarky and his old school enemy, he thought. Either way, Malfoy isn’t gay. And for that matter, neither am I!   
“By the way, I could still throw you off the astronomy tower if you want me to. I had it all planned out and everything. See, I could just push you as you walked to class. No-one would suspect a thing. The Boy Who Lived, yup, right up until he fell from a building. Quite tragically I might add.” And just like that the tension was snuffed out like a candle.   
Harry, who had been alternating between gaping and laughing through Draco’s soliloquy was starting to wonder where he sat on an idiocy scale between zero and muggle-dashboard-bobble-heads. Why do I even care what he thinks? But what he said was,   
“Great to know that you’ve already planned my death”  
“Oh yes, between being rejected in first year, second year, third year, fourth year, trying to find your army in fifth year and trying not to get killed in sixth, there was a lot of time for that honestly. They were worse in second year I assure you”  
“I don’t understand? How did I reject you that many times, sure in first year I didn’t shake your hand but to be honest you were kind of a prick, but what about the rest of them?”  
A light blush crept up Draco’s porcelain cheeks, just light enough to see, “let’s see, first year I came thinking that you could be my best friend and then you chose Weasley above me,” he said Ron’s surname as if it were toxin in his mouth, “but I’ve made my peace with that because I admit that I was an arse. Second year I wrote you a really terrible poem and then blamed it on Weaslette”  
In all honesty, Harry couldn’t remember a single word to that poem (it probably consisted of thinly veiled threats under seemingly romantic notions) but the memory of the ghosts and gnomes/cherubs reading St Valentine’s Day poems on Professor Lockheart’s command was still accessible. Harry almost shuddered at the thought.   
“Third year you just hated me plus you had bigger things to worry about than me writing you nice little notes inside the paper cranes if you used a revealing charm, and with that map of yours, I thought you might’ve checked. Fourth year I admit the ‘potter stinks’ badges may have been perceived as cruel but-”  
“That was cruel!” Harry exclaimed. “And you spent all of fifth year trying to get me expelled, you said so yourself!”  
“But my father wanted me to so he could remain in cahoots with the minister, I’m not a bad person! And well you can’t judge me for sixth year, you would’ve done the same, I just didn’t want to die, I was not going to do it and I think you know that, but he said that he would kill me and my mother and father.”  
“And you plotted my death why exactly?”  
“Because I did not know how to deal with you, of course”  
“Why ‘of course’?”   
Malfoy was blushing quite heavily now.  
“You are quite daft, you know that Potter?”   
“So I’ve been told, mainly by you. Anyway did you say the word ‘cahoots’ before?” Harry asked with the ghost of a smile.  
“I can see why, and no. Of course I didn’t. Do I look like the kind of person who would say that?”  
“Still don’t know why I am daft.” Harry shrugged with a grin.  
Draco looked exasperated, “that makes you even more daft, git”  
Harry had to stop for a second. What in Merlin’s good name was he doing?! He thought, am I flirting? With Malfoy? And the most concerning thought, and do I like it? After a very brief second of thinking it over, he concluded that in order, the answers to his questions were; talking to Draco Malfoy, maybe, yes and apparently yes.   
“Why am I daft?”  
Draco was blushing again, “I have no idea”  
Harry sighed. All he really wanted to do was curl up and sleep but with sleep came nightmares and with nightmares came humiliation. And he didn’t want to humiliate himself in front of Draco. Not now at least. Not when they had formed some semblance of friendship. Or whatever this was.   
“Anyways, you said that you would show me where you were trying to go.” Draco shook his head to clear his thoughts a little.  
Harry groaned and fell back onto the armchair behind him, “but I’m so comfy here.”  
“It is quite wonderful here isn’t it?” Draco did the same thing but somehow made it look much more graceful, like he was moving through water.   
“’m really tired” Harry murmured.   
“Well then sleep”  
“Here?”  
“Why not?”  
“I thought that you said that we aren’t friends.” Harry’s eyelids were heavy, and keeping them open was a battle that he was losing.  
“Yeah, well, maybe I get things wrong too.” It was probably a good thing that Harry’s eyes were closed when he beamed at Draco, because Draco didn’t want to lose this odd, fast-paced friendship by having Harry see him melt.   
The black haired boy sighed his agreement as he fell asleep, feeling more protected than he had been in a long time. The nightmares still came, but they weren’t as bad as they could have been and when he woke up the first time Draco was still awake and he was singing to himself in what sounded to Harry like French, and the next dream he had, he didn’t remember in the morning but it featured him grabbing the cuff of Draco’s robe sleeve, dragging him into this room and kissing him right on the mouth for hours.


End file.
